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Shoppers are more upbeat about Amazon Prime Day than they were a year ago

July 12, 2016 01:51 PM

Take a quick spin through the hashtag #PrimeDayFail today on Twitter and you’ll find yourself bombarded with posts related to consumers’ frustrations that they encountered problems adding items to their cart and checking out.

The problems arose earlier this morning. And Twitter users were quick to voice their frustrations.

#PrimeDay is awesome until you actually try to buy something.... #PrimeDayFail pic.twitter.com/2SJ1FHtOLS

— Stephanie Caraway (@scare_away) July 12, 2016

Amazon turned to Twitter to address consumers’ concerns with a blanket post noting that it was aware of the situation.

Some customers are reporting difficulty with checkout. We're working to resolve this issue quickly.

— Amazon (@amazon) July 12, 2016

That post may have helped mitigate at least some of consumers’ frustrations about Prime Day, according to the Adobe Digital Insights. which found that only 38% of consumers’ posts about the e-commerce sales event were related to “sadness,” as of 6 p.m. Eastern time. That’s a marked 12 percentage point decrease from a year ago when half of all Prime Day-related tweets were related to “sadness,” which were largely the result of consumers underwhelmed by the deals offered by Amazon.com Inc., which is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide.

Adobe also found that 31% of posts related to “joy,” such as a consumer who bought an engagement ring during the sale.

That 31% was an eight percentage point increase from a year ago. That shift in sentiment shows that Amazon took note of consumers' reactions to last year, says Adam Lloyd, an Adobe Digital Insights senior analyst. "Amazon appears to have really taken to heart the feelings and emotions that were conveyed online last year," he says. "Amazon upped its game by offering better deals, which is why we've seen joy-related posts rise."

The Adobe Digital Insights's sentiment analysis tags consumers’ social media posts as being related to “sadness,” “joy,” “admiration” or “surprise.”

Overall, net sentiment dropped slightly today to 3.29 from 3.99 before the sale started. Net Sentiment is an algorithm that examines the words in consumers' posts and the context they are used to score them on a 10-point scale that ranges from -5 to 5 to examine how consumers feel about Prime Day.

Despite Amazon's sale creating more satisified customers, the online retailer hasn't seen much growth in the number of U.S. shoppers posting about Prime Day on social networks. Last year there were roughly 300,000 Prime Day-related posts on the day of the sale. As of 6 p.m. Eastern time, there were about 165,000 Prime Day-related posts.

Want a quick fact sheet on Amazon Prime Day from 2015 and how it compared to all other major e-retailing sale events?